Vice President Pence (VPP) – Mr. President, thank you for keeping this a secret and I apologize for the late hour.

President Trump (PT) – Mike, what the hell is going on here? I was in the middle of a very important tweet. I superimposed Jim Acosta’s head on a walrus and he was looking really stupid.

VPP – Sorry Mr. President. I’m sure that was really important but this is critical.

PT – Alright, now that I’m here, what gives?

VPP – In this top-secret military lab our top men have been perfecting a practical method for time travel.

PT – Hey that’s great Mike. Now I can go back in time and make bets on sports games and get rich like Biff did in Back to the Future Part 2.

VPP – Actually Sir, going back in time and changing it is a very dangerous thing to do. And it’s one of the reasons I called you here.

PT – I don’t get it. I haven’t even done anything yet. Why are you already giving me grief about it?

VPP – Actually it’s Hillary Clinton that’s the problem here.

PT – What does Crooked Hillary have to do with my time machine.

VPP – Your time machine? Oh, never mind. Let me explain. Secretary Clinton found out about the project from Obama back when he was pillaging the United States of America. After your election victory she has been looking for some way to thwart the election results and she selected the time machine as the last resort. She plans to go back in time and change history in some way that will allow her to become the president. In fact, she has already used the machine.

PT – Doesn’t this old hag ever quit? So how do we stop her?

VPP – Mr. President, if you’ve read Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” or watched “Back to the Future” you know that tampering with the past can be catastrophic.

PT – Yeah, yeah. Like when Michael J. Fox starts disappearing from the polaroid photo of his family. Which if you think about it doesn’t really make any sense. Boy, that Spielberg really was a slacker. So, I’m in danger of ceasing to exist.

VPP – Precisely. We think Hillary will attempt to prevent you from being born by interfering in your parents’ lives. In fact, we think she’s already succeeded.

PT – Well, then why am I still here?

VPP – Because this lab has an inertial time field associated with it that delays changes to the temporal fabric of the universe within a range of 5 miles and for a period of about two weeks.

PT – Good thing for me.

VPP – Ain’t it the truth.

PT – Okay, get me the DeLaurean or put me in the machine and send me back. Will I be naked like the Terminator?

VPP – No Mr. President.

PT – Good. Because despite his terrible work on The Apprentice, Schwarzenegger definitely looks better naked than I do at the moment. I really have to lay off the pasta.

VPP – Mr. President we don’t have much time. We’ve got to set up the machine and plan out the mission. Hillary is wearing a controller that looks like a lady’s Rolex that allows her to move forward and back in time to whatever point in history she wants. We will provide you with an equivalent controller in a men’s Rolex.

PT – I’d prefer a Trump Chronichron. It looks like a Rolex but can be purchased at Macy’s for only $450. It’s quite a deal.

VPP – I’m sorry Mr. President, there’s no time.

PT – That statement seems ironic under these circumstances.

VPP – I am aware. Now in addition to allowing the wearer to time travel the watch allows us to keep track of the traveler. For instance, we know that Hillary is currently in 5th Century B.C. Athens. We will send you there first. Your mission is to thwart any actions by Hillary and protect the outline of Western Civilization throughout our timeline. Do you have any questions?

PT – Yes, can I bring guns?

VPP – No Mr. President, that would be extremely damaging to the thread of history.

PT – I figured you’d say that. You know Mike, you really should learn how to live a little.

VPP – Sure.

PT – Alright, I’m ready. Let her rip.

VPP – God speed Mr. President. We’re all rooting for you. None of us want Hillary for a boss. She’s a lousy bitch.

Epilogue:

As you know if you’ve read “The Funeral Oration of Trumpicles” Donald was successful in defeating Hillary (or as she was called back then Clintoninus). Stay tuned for the further adventures of Time-Traveler-Trump as he does battle in the day before yesterday to save tomorrow!

Anyone who has watched TV around Christmas has probably seen a Frank Capra movie because every year they play “It’s a Wonderful Life” non-stop for a week straight. And that’s a really good Capra film. But Capra made a bunch of good films in his day and some of them are among my favorites. And my all-time favorite is “It Happened One Night.” Filmed in 1934, it stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in a screwball comedy that wants us to believe that an heiress on the run from her father would meet up accidentally on a bus with a reporter who needs her runaway story to salvage his newspaper career. Their trek from Florida to New York begins with each despising the other and ends up, of course, with them falling in love. But of course, the course of true love is never smooth and never was that truer than with this goofy tale. The key to the success of this movie, for me, is the chemistry between Gable and Colbert. He is the seemingly self-confident man of the world. He knows it all and claims to be able to write a book about every skill from how to correctly dunk a doughnut, to how to thumb a ride on the highway. She starts out as the arrogant little rich girl. Pretending to need no one’s help and always in charge. Once they broker a deal to travel together to their mutual interests, they proceed to heckle each other and bicker until they pretty convincingly fall in love. My wife and I have always thought of this as a pretty much perfect date movie. It has a little something for both sexes. Gable gets to strut and brag in his king of the jungle act and Colbert is the sarcastic little woman. In one of my favorite scenes Gable is demonstrating his various “foolproof” methods of thumbing a ride. After a string of failures, he dejectedly admits maybe he shouldn’t write that book after all. Colbert says she’ll get a ride and won’t even have to use her thumb at all. Of course, she walks over to the rod, lifts her skirt above her knee and the first passing car slams on the brakes and the emergency brake too. An amused Colbert says to the glum Gable that she had just answered an age-old riddle. He asks what and she replies “that the limb is mightier than the thumb.” And he viciously replies “well why didn’t you just take off all your clothes and you could have gotten a hundred rides?” to which she serenely replies “when we need a hundred rides I will.”

As I mentioned earlier, the couple don’t smoothly move from reluctant partners to sweethearts without obstacles and by the last reel misunderstanding and anger almost conspire to destroy this match made on a Greyhound Bus. But of course, happily ever after is bound to be in a Capra film so the fear of tragedy is never serious.

The movie is full of little details of life in depression era America and the vignettes with the denizens of the bus and other locales add charm to the story. Capra filled his depression era movies with scenes of the common people displaying compassion and camaraderie in the face of adversity. The scene where the bus riders amuse themselves with a relatively untalented singing performance is amusing and appealing if a little contrived.

If you’ve never seen the movie, I unreservedly recommend it. If you don’t like it then I recommend you do not read any more of my reviews. Our points of view on film would be just too far out of synch to allow any value to you. And may God have mercy on your poor shriveled soul.

“The Missionaries,” by Owen Stanley is a book that can be enjoyed without having to first categorize it. But while reviewing it I feel it is necessary to identify some of the qualities present in order to attract the target audience and repel those who are clearly the targets of its humor. So, trigger warning, if you think Hillary Clinton should have won the 2016 US presidential election you’re not going to want to read this book. But if you think that the high point of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s career was reached as a double entendre during a Seinfeld episode then this might be the book for you.

The book is a binge, an aristophanean binge. The characters are in some ways caricatures, but the narrative proceeds fluidly from one fantastically ridiculous scene to the next. The absurdities are piled up, one on top of the other, until the eventual catastrophe finally resolves the comedy.

The story takes place in the indefinite past that, based on tell-tales like typewriters and the existence of the UN, must be taking place during the Cold War. An island in the Pacific called Elephant Island is being administered by an appointee of the Australian government named Roger Fletcher. He has managed to pacify the indigenous (and cannibalistic) tribesmen by convincing them that he is a minor deity of theirs. When the UN is given a mandate to move Elephant Island to independence, it unleashes a chain of events that demonstrates how social justice policy decisions and stone age tribal dynamics can combine to form a close approximation of the Apocalypse.

I would be a spoil sport if I revealed all the better bits that make up this comedy. For me the innovation is seeing all of the sacred cows that are typically given the best lines in novels about the third world (or is it fourth world?) getting mugged by reality. All the pieties about empowering non-western societies come back to bite the smug leftists right in the ass. In fact, from my point of view, they get off too easily. I would have enjoyed much more pay back. But I have quite a bit of Sicilian in my family tree so I shouldn’t be considered an objective judge.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it for anyone on the right wing who thinks the UN should be defunded and moved to Newark, New Jersey. My only real complaint is I wish it were much longer. I could see this as the basis for series of books or a long television series with episodic action leading slowly to the eventual climax at the end of season five (or even eight). So much more could be added to the characterizations and back stories. I feel cheated that I won’t get to read the prequel describing the arrival of Fletcher to Elephant Island and his taming of the natives. We could have been given flashbacks of the UN personnel in their earlier roles. And of course, we could find out whether the capital city (Ungabunga) was named by the indigenous people or (more likely) by Fletcher. But, alas, we’ll probably never learn these important details. Damn you Owen Stanley!

Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly recommend The Missionaries to anyone who was ever forced to read any of that genera of modern novels that bemoan the fate of noble indigenous peoples under the control of evil, white, colonial rule. My most dreary example of this genera was a book I received as part of a subscription to a magazine. The book was “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (APITFOTL) by Peter Matthiessen. It was just alive with noble savages and filthy with misguided missionaries and other white people getting in the way of noble savagery. Reading “The Missionaries” is a sort of catharsis for this. It’s as if reading APITFOTL infected my soul and left an overgrown boil that had festered for all these years and this new book was an intellectual scalpel that lanced that boil and allowed it to drain and heal. Wow, I sound like a very angry old guy. Anyway, read the book oh my brothers. It’s good for the soul.